Redcentric is aiming to double its UK VMware marketshare, its CEO said, despite acknowledging that parent Broadcom can be “capricious”.
The AIM-listed outfit – which ranked 20th in Oxygen 250 2026 – became a pure-play MSP once again last week when it closed the £124.9m sale of its £45m-revenue datacentre business.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen following Redcentric’s full-year results on Monday, Senecal de Fonseca said its post-divestment USP is “all about our story on the compliance, security and sovereign bit”, adding that her firm has invested heavily in VMware’s latest frontier AI platform.
“I’m going for 30% of that core market”
The Harrogate-based outfit is taking aim at the circa 60% of VMware cores Senecal de Fonseca estimated are available to the vendor’s seven UK Pinnacle partners, she said.
“There’s probably going to be a third of clients who’ll say, ‘I don’t want to be beholden to Broadcom’,” Senecal de Fonseca told IT Channel Oxygen in the wake of its full-year results.
“There’s also a portion that are part of the global world – the top 500 customers – who go directly to VMware themselves.
“But the rest of the market is what the seven Pinnacle partners [including Redcentric] are able to look at.
”What we can see from the cores available from that addressable market, we’re already at 15%. My pipeline is another 12% – I would like to double it. I’m trying to go for 30% of that core market.”
Redcentric’s target VMware customers include not only end-user organisations but a “huge swathe” of cloud service providers, including newly announced CSP customer Syntura, Senecal de Fonseca said.
“I’m not placing all of Redcentric’s future just on one [vendor], because I also know Broadcom can be capricious, and they change the programme rules on a regular basis,” she added, however.
Broadcom has in fact just brought in a rule change enabling VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) and MSPs to keep their admin rights for a period after the 31 March 2027 sunset deadline, Senecal de Fonseca noted.
“In three weeks, we’ve come up with a new way to onboard those people to come through us, and they can keep part of their admin rights,” she said.
“My parents could never understand it”
Appointed as Redcentric’s CEO in May 2025 after stints at Citrix, Vodafone and NextiraOne, Senecal de Fonseca began her career in politics (her early bosses included President George H. W. Bush, and President Ronald Reagan – see here).
That experience taught her how to “get an output from a very opaque environment”, she claimed.
“My parents could never understand why I was interested in going into politics like that – they just didn’t feel there was anything substantial that comes out of it,” Senecal de Fonseca recalled.
“It makes you creative in strategy, understanding people’s desires, understanding regulation.
“Part of the reason I moved into telecommunications is because it was a regulated industry, and you have to learn how to play that game.”
On that note, Senecal de Fonseca earlier this year enlisted former Marks & Spencer CTO Josie Smith, who she said helped managed last year’s cyberattack at the retailer. Redcentric itself will soon be regulated under the Telecoms Services Act, she stressed.
“She’s now our Chief Customer Officer and CIO and is spending time going out to our customers and working with them on their security posture,” she said.
“I don’t want to go back to growth by all means”
Although Redcentric’s revenues for its year to 31 March 2026 fell 2.2% to £132m, CFO Tim Sykes hailed its 0.6% rise in underlying ARR as an “early indicator of growth”.
Net debt has been slashed from £36.8m to £2.8m following the datacentre sale, which Skyes said “positions the balance sheet really strongly against the competitive environment”.
“There’s very few that could probably compete with us in terms of the strengths of our financial position right now. So that’s really helpful on the commercial side,” he said.
Redcentric’s recent VMware wins won’t translate into revenue right away, Senecal de Fonseca stressed.
“When you’re signing seven year deals, it is a migration path,” she said.
Future M&A is “not off the table, but will be very opportunistic”, Senecal de Fonseca added.
“I don’t want to go back to the days where it’s growth by all means – just do another acquisition and keep bumping it up,” she said.
“We feel we can have a breath now that the datacentres are gone and really be more committed to just doing one thing and doing it really well.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
